It’s clear, though, when you look at the Buddha’s teachings, that he encouraged us to make effort in meditation, and in our lives generally. His last words, in fact, were “With diligence, strive on.”

And in my own meditation I find I have to make effort all the time. I have to let go of compulsive thinking, steer my awareness back to the body and the breathing, correct my posture, adjust my attitudes.

One section of the Eightfold Path — one of the Buddha’s key teachings — is “Right Effort.” Right effort is counted as being part of the meditation (samadhi) section of the path.

Right Effort, in the context of the eightfold path, is seen as one of three pivotal aspects of practice, along with Right View and Right Mindfulness. Every aspect of practice depends upon effort, mindfulness, and view.

Effort, mindfulness, and view are described as three states that “run around and circle” all other practices. For example, if you want to practice Right Speech, you first have to be mindful of your speech. Without mindfulness, there is no possibility of any practice. You also have to have a discriminating awareness (or view) of which speech activities are unskillful and cause suffering, and which are skillful and lead us away from suffering. And then you actually need to make effort to abandon unskillful speech and to cultivate skillful speech. So on every step of the path, effort is involved, along with mindfulness and view.

Right Effort is usually defined in terms of the Four Right Efforts, or Exertions. These are:

1. The effort to prevent the arising of unskillful qualities that have not yet arisen.
2. The effort to abandon unskillful qualities that have already arisen.
3. The effort to cultivate skillful qualities that have not yet arisen.
4. The effort to maintain and increase to fruition skillful qualities that have arisen

Of course we can make either too much or too little effort. There once was a monk called Sona, who was considering giving up monastic life because his efforts weren’t paying off. Just as he was wondering whether he should return to his family, the Buddha appeared to Sona. (This was described as the Buddha “magically” appearing, but I think we could take this as the image of the Buddha appearing in Sona’s mind as he debated with himself.) The (imagined) Buddha asked Sona:

“Before, when you were a house-dweller, were you skilled at playing the lute?”

Sona of course replied that he had.

The (imagined) Buddha went on:

“And what do you think: when the strings of your lute were too taut, was your lute in tune and playable?”

“No, lord,” replied Sona.

“And what do you think: when the strings of your lute were too loose, was your lute in tune and playable?”

“No, lord.”

“And what do you think: when the strings of your lute were neither too taut nor too loose, but tuned to be right on pitch, was your lute in tune and playable? … In the same way, Sona, over-aroused persistence leads to restlessness, overly slack persistence leads to laziness. Thus you should find the right pitch for your energy, attune the pitch of your faculties, and thus begin your reflections.”

How do we know when, like Sona, we’re making too much or too little effort? The thing is that for our effort to be “right” effort it needs to be combined with mindfulness and right view. Mindfulness allows us to notice what the results of our efforts are, which right view lets us know whether those efforts are helpful or unhelpful, and whether we’re making the right kind of effort.

For example, if your mind lacks mindfulness, and you’re simply drifting, lost in thought, then you’re not exerting enough effort. If you’re feeling a sense of despair about your practice, then you also probably don’t have enough effort. If you’re getting tense and uptight, then you’re making too much effort. If you’re in a state of elation and aren’t very sensitive and kind to others, then you’re probably making too much effort. If you’re giving yourself a hard time, you’re trying too hard. It’s our mindfulness and our “view” that let us know what’s going on and whether it’s helpful.

You need to keep noticing what’s happening around your effort; what’s happening as a result of your effort. When we do that, our effort is more likely to be balanced.

The word “effort” and the related word “work” sometimes give the wrong idea. We can think of work and effort as being joyless activities. So when I talk about working in meditation, and putting effort into our practice, I like to flank the words “work” or “effort” with the terms “rest” and “play.” There needs to be a relaxation of any unnecessary effort — the effort that goes into making the body tense, or that goes into endless thinking, for example. So around our effort there needs to be an attitude of restful, mindful, expansive awareness. And the effort we make should ideally not be forced or unnatural, but light and playful. Meditation can become a joyful exploration: “Where can I go today?”

Yes, there may be times when we have to struggle (to stay awake for example) or have to forcefully restrain ourselves from doing something that we think is grossly unhelpful (for example when we repress the urge to say something unkind) but these should increasingly be unnecessary as we retrain the mind.

Now, it is possible to get to a point in our meditation practice where we don’t need to make any effort. The mind clears and becomes still, joy arises, and we’re simply present to our experience as it unfolds. The positive factors we’ve been developing in the mind reach a kind of critical mass and establish themselves stably. It seems that you’re not meditating — that your meditation is simply doing itself. It doesn’t seem that “you” are doing anything. But to get to that point we need to first put in some effort — usually a lot of effort. On the way to effortlessness in meditation, we find that we generally have to use a subtler and subtler kind of effort. We start to realize that any effort we make creates a kind of disturbance in the mind, and so we refine our effort. One image I love is of catching a feather on a fan; we have to make effort to catch the feather, but if you move too quickly you’ll blow the feather away. But we still have to make an effort — at least for a while.

As Shunryu Suzuki said, “Strictly speaking, any effort we make is not good for our practice because it creates waves in our mind. It is impossible, however, to attain absolute calmness of our mind without any effort.”

It’s not really possible to short-cut this process, and jump straight to effortless meditation. Eventually we get to the point in meditation where effort is in fact unnecessary, but to get there we need to use an effort that is balanced, mindful, and, where possible, playful.

[Click on the image for a larger version.]

This Buddha statue reclines gracefully on the ledge of one of the windows in the “yoga room” (it’s called that, although there’s hardly ever any yoga done there) below the shrineroom at Aryaloka Buddhist Center in Newmarket, NH.

My Ego

When I came to Buddhism 22 years ago, I would never have admitted to being an addict. After all I was doing what everybody else was doing in my work and social life. No one I knew  was in a 12 step program, or thinking about sobriety. We were in our 20s, happy go lucky and indulging in our hedonistic lives.

In fact when I first mentioned I was going to stop drinking, my friends were horrified. “What? Not even champagne?” How could I refuse such an offer? “Okay champagne only.” That’s how I became the champagne Queen. People knew not to offer me anything else but the fizz.

By the time I was 28 I got to a place in my life where I knew I had burnt copious holes in my brain. Something intuitively told me meditation was the answer, despite the fact I had never formally meditated before. However, I knew the brain was capable of developing new brain cells, and therefore it needed something like meditation, learning a new language or simply doing headstands to revitalize it. Meditation I thought was the easiest option.

Thankfully, visiting a Buddhist Temple was much more hip among my friends. After all, we all needed something to balance our lives in the fast lane.  It was safer than therapy, and not considered navel gazing. The fact I could go to meditation class, and go out clubbing all night after, was acceptable.

I drank Aqualibra and so nobody noticed I wasn’t drinking.  I could meditate for half an hour, get up from my cushions and feel high. I could go on a week retreat, and feel like I was tripping. My addict had found something else to obsess with. I hadn’t bargained for the Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, or for reciting the five lay precepts, one of which was ‘abstaining from taking intoxicants.’

There came a point that I had to admit listening to dharma talks was having an impact on my life. Alcohol and stimulants began to fall away. Even some friends too, but most were inspired by the fact that I had found a natural way to be high. I got addicted to guarana,  a native American plant, and kola nut, an African caffeine bean. I had gone from being the champagne queen, to the Duracell battery, as I had more energy than anyone who had popped or snorted something.

I began to realize that champagne, stimulants and natural highs were all about my external ego. How sad was that? As soon as I realized this I began to let go. However, my root dis-ease, root addiction, was food. From the age of 16 I struggled with anorexia, and then became a chronic bulimic. I could not walk past a food shop, or a table of food without eating. I could not refuse food, and would steal and lie to get my choice of drug. I could not eat food without throwing it all up. And so I was on the pendulum of craving and aversion.

Amidst this whirl wind of partying, and natural highs, meditation had cultivated a gap. It was this gap, that led me to recovery. In the gap, I had to discover my own truth. That I was an addict, and I needed to change. Not just an addict to food, but I was addicted to life. I didn’t want to age, get sick or die. The irony was that I was living a life that could accelerate all of these things. I didn’t want to see the ascetic, the fourth sight of the Buddha. To witness the man begging, was too much of a harsh metaphor. It would mean having to let go of how I made my money, how I lived my life. I would have to question my ethics.

The four noble truths came to my rescue. Next month, some of the things that shaped me before I was graced with the Buddhist core teachings; The Four Noble Truths.

A large stone Buddha head I photographed while I was leading a workshop at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY.

Yes it’s true that in meditation, we’re told to drop everything and let go. But that doesn’t mean becoming passive and ineffectual. There’s more to this instruction than meets the eye.

There’s an image that comes to mind for me to illustrate what letting go is like. Imagine we’re kayaking down a river. One way we could do it is to paddle like hell, trying to force our way around, fighting the currents, insisting that the kayak go exactly where I want it to go. And doing it how I want to do it.

Or, we could survey the terrain and current before jumping in. Then we ride the current and let it take us most of the way to where we want to go. We steer to make sure we don’t get dashed against rocks or end up heading down the wrong side of the river. We could also use a calmer bend in the river to stop and look ahead to plan our next stretch. We can steer our course without using nearly as much effort this way, adjusting our path as we go along.

Life can be the same way. We don’t have make all the effort ourselves to make things happen from beginning to end. If we expand our view beyond our self-absorbed need to reach our goal, there’s a whole universe of structures and currents out there that can help us.

At work for example, if we find people who have common goals and interests as we do, our combined energies can often accomplish more than the sum of us individually could. Involving our boss in our plans sometimes results in him clearing a path in front of us, getting us resourses, additional help, budgets, etc. Tagging onto existing workflows and procedures means we don’t have to create everything ourselves.

Letting go can help us in our inner world, too. Have you noticed how creative ideas often pop up when you’re taking a shower or walking the dog? In other words, when you’re not really trying? Recent neuroscientific research¹ suggests that making less effort is what helps. When we become effortful in problem solving, it generally means we’re pushing our way through our old, familiar ways of doing things. And often, those are exactly the ways that haven’t worked, but we keep pounding at them anyway. When we keep repeating the same thing over and over, we become blind to other possibilities. So to be “not effortful” means to inhibit the thoughts that don’t work in order to leave room for something else to emerge.

Not being effortful also means your mind is quieter and more conducive to new ideas. A creative thought is one that brings up a long-forgotten memory or combines some of them in a new way. Neurologically speaking, they involve connections between far fewer neurons than your front-of-mind thoughts. So the signals they emit are much weaker, and generally get drowned out by your much louder, effortful thoughts. To give those quieter thoughts a fighting chance to be noticed, it helps to have a quiet mind. One that has “let go” of jangly discursive thinking.

So letting go doesn’t mean letting go of everything — just the stuff that gets in our way. In this context, it means letting go of our obsessive focus on results, and our inflexible views of how to get there. It doesn’t mean dropping all thoughts about the future, but finding a more open and flexible relationship with them.

The larger perspective of the teaching on “letting go” is an acknowledgment that I am a part of a highly interconnected world. Every time I get hyper-focused on my own little view of the world, I am being blind to the way things really are. To think that I can do things exclusively my way is to be foolish and ignorant. And it’s bound to get me into trouble, or at least cause me a lot of stress.

But at the same time, I’m not a helpless victim either. I am the agent of my own free will, and can use it to steer my path through life. With mindfulness, we can skillfully navigate our way through all these forces to get to a better outcome. And it’s not just me that benefits — because everything I do ultimately benefits everyone.

At the end of the MBSR course we ask the question, does mindfulness practice touch on your underlying values – things you really care about that can continue to motivate you over the years? It’s moving to hear what people say: “I’ve spent my life rushing, now I want to go deeper”; “I really love my children and I want to communicate with them better”; “my depression has meant that I feel I have missed out on years of my life, now I want to really live it.”

Often we’re driven instead by the need to manage arrangements, earn a living and respond to demands and that can get mixed with anxiety and worrying what other people think of us. So here’s a simple exercise to help connect with your core values.

•  Take a sheet of paper and write on it: ‘Things I love’ then make a list of everything you can think of, keeping your hand moving for several minutes, not thinking or censoring too much
• Then take another sheet of paper and write: ‘Times I’ve felt fulfilled and truly alive’, and do the same
• Look at your lists see what patterns or issues emerge and write a list of the most important values or qualities that these lists express.
• Next time you meditate, turn those words or phrases over in your mind. If you notice a particular resonance or impulse to act, then notice it. Also notice if there’s a judging voice telling you that you really ought to do something because you aren’t a good enough person, and let it go.

Real change comes when we find new ways of being more truly ourselves.

This makes me long for the days when I used to live around the corner from the Glasgow Film Theatre, where I enjoyed many fine foreign movies…

So this is definitely a part of our experience.

You may not have realized, though, just how infectious our emotions are. The effect of one person’s emotions — whether negative or positive — can be measured as they ripple outward through our friendships and contacts.

Let’s deal with the negative first.

An important study by University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo showed that lonely people tend to share their loneliness with others. He uncovered this by looking at data from a large-scale study that has been following health conditions for more than 60 years.

You might be wondering: if lonely people aren’t in contact with others, how can they spread their loneliness? The thing is that loneliness is a state of mind rather than an absolute absence of social connections. Lonely people may be with others much of the time, but they aren’t able to connect. They feel disconnected and isolated even in social situations. And the people they are in contact with pick up on and share those feelings. But those feelings do of course affect relationships, and lonely people lose friends. Sadly, before their friends leave, they end up feeling lonely as well!

This is true for other negative emotions, too, such as anger and depression. It’s even true for factors such as obesity, criminality, and bankruptcy.

Now for the positive.

Another study by Harvard Medical School professor Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler from the University of California, San Diego, found that happiness also spreads through populations. One happy person spreads their joy to others. In fact, they could measure the increase in happiness as it formed a chain reaction that benefitted not only people’s friends, but their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends. This effect lasts for up to one year.

How strong is this effect? It’s strong. If you’re happy, a friend living within a mile experiences a 25% chance of being more happy. One of your friends’ friends has nearly a 10 percent chance of increased happiness, and a friend of that friend has a 5.6 percent increased chance—a three-degree cascade. Compare that to, say, a $5000 income bump, which increases your odds of being happy by just 2%.

Every happy person in our world has a significant effect on many people around them, adding in a measurable way to the sum total of human happiness.

A study by Nicholas A. Christakis and others showed that the average lifetime of a contentment “infection” is 10 years, while the average lifetime of a discontentment “infection” is 5 years.

Also, this study showed that happiness spreads faster than misery. As Christakis says, “It’s pleasurable to be near other happy individuals and not near other unhappy individuals.”

Sometimes the quest for happiness is seen as being selfish, but it’s clear that that’s a shortsighted view. Our own happiness has an effect on others around us, and it’s almost an imperative for us to become happier if we want others to be happy.

As the Buddha said, 2,500 years ago,

Conquer the angry man by love.
Conquer the ill-natured man by goodness.
Conquer the miser with generosity.
Conquer the liar with truth.

When you consider how powerfully interconnected our world is (for example, on Facebook every person is, on average five connections away from any other person) it’s clear that this ripple effect is a powerful force for changing the world. Remember, one happy person raises the happiness of people — measurably — even at three degrees of separation, and possibly beyond.

This means each of us is more powerful than we may give ourselves credit for. Your happiness (or your grumbling) can affect the world. Use your power wisely!

Rick Hanson, author of Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom and Just One Thing: Developing A Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time, talks about how to develop compassion for yourself.

When you watch a movie about climbing mountains, and you are afraid of heights, does the fear of the situation cause your heart to race and your palms to sweat?

These are examples of how energy and feelings are contagious.

And have you noticed that when you are with someone who is negative, you feel negative too?

This frequently happens when someone is talking in a negative way, or complaining, about someone or a situation.

Listening to negativity and complaints is not an uplifting, positive experience.

But listening to someone speak about what is positive about a situation or a person can lift our hearts and our moods and then we feel positive as well.

Have you ever been in a lackluster, dull mood and then spent some time with a friend who was happy and in a positive frame of mind? Did you find that your friend’s positivity was contagious? I have witnessed that situation and experienced it as well.

In meetings with friends, at work or with family members, we can have an effect on the emotional tone of the gathering. Our positive outlook can transform a negative atmosphere.

The next time you are with one person or a group of people, and the discussion becomes negative with gossip or ill will, try turning it around by speaking about the positive qualities of the person other people are gossiping about.

At work, if colleagues are speaking negatively about a change in procedure, you might empathize with their feelings about the change and then, if you see positive outcomes of the change, mention them.

We can sometimes fall into feeling negatively without even realizing what is happening. With mindfulness and an understanding of the interactions between a couple of people or a group of people, we can turn negative energy into positive energy.

Do you have a friend or family member who is negative most of the time? Try turning the interaction around by being positive and see whether being positive is contagious.

How we think about and respond to situations is our choice. We have a choice to be negative or to be positive. Negativity breeds more negativity. Positivity breeds more positivity.

Each person’s positivity has an effect on the people they are with – positivity is contagious.